When I first moved into my dirty old apartment, we didn’t have the two students living above us. For a short time, while the building manager was ill, a property management company came in and helped fill the vacant apartments. This company is well known in this city for not properly vetting their clients, and renting to some pretty shady characters. So, the apartment above mine was rented out by them.

At first, the people there seemed nice, from what I was told. It was supposedly a young mother with her baby son, and her boyfriend would be staying there on and off. They seemed nice enough, and the apartment was rented out to them.

Turns out, that wasn’t who would be living there, really. Yes, she had a baby son living with her, but she also had a daughter there too. And her boyfriend moved in full time. And so did his brother. And their two friends. And two cats and a few Dobermans. Then the Rottweiler. Did I mention these small, two bedroom apartments had a “no pets” clause in the lease?

People started moving in slowly. When the property manager would stop by, the girl would say that her friend was helping her with her kids that day, or that there were so many guys there because they were going to have a guys night and play poker.

What they were really all doing there was growing marijuana.

It turns out, they were growing, drying, and then selling marijuana from the apartment. They also were NOT cleaning, or paying bills, or taking care of the kids living there.

When I went to first look at the apartment, before we rented, the building manager told us that the tenants upstairs were being evicted and would be out before we moved in.

Well that didn’t happen.

They were served with an eviction notice, and ignored it. They had their power shut off, which inadvertently shut down the power to my apartment as well. Didn’t bother them, they brought in noisy, stinky generators. They got served with ANOTHER eviction notice, and ignored it. Finally, the building manager said that he was going to get the police involved, which apparently scared the people with the illegal grow-op in their apartment. They started making arrangements to move.

Until then, they raised hell.

We couldn’t sleep at night because they would be up all night, stomping and screaming and yelling. We still had no power, because when the power company came around to turn it on, they scared them away. The stink from their apartment was starting to waft through the hallways and down the staircases. They started throwing things out their apartment windows, without taking out the screens first: they just ripped them open.

One day, the threw their cats out the second floor windows. One landed and ran away. The other hobbled around, and you could see that it was sick. Some mechanics from the shop across the street took it in, and had a veterinarian friend of their come take a look at it. That vet said he had never seen a more abused, diseased cat before. Its bones had been broken, it was sick with almost a dozen different things, and its eyes were so infected that they crusted shut. They put the poor thing in a shoe box to make it comfortable, and it passed away a few hours later.

Once the poor cat was gone, a group of very large, very angry mechanics showed up on the doorstep upstairs, looking for whomever had hurt that poor thing. I don’t know what was said, but those people moved out a few days later.

The building manager and two of the tenants who had been in the building more than 25 years decided to do a walk-through of the apartment together, to see the damage. I don’t think they were quite expecting what they saw.

The carpeting in the bedrooms was ripped up, and they had let their dogs poop under it. There were garbage bags full of old diapers, rotten food, and cat litter all over the apartment. They had stopped using the toilet once they were told the police would be called on them, and started peeing on the floor, covering the puddles up with the kids’ clothes. In some areas, they had even punched holes in the walls and had shoved garbage in there.

The building manager said it would take at least a week to clean, and that the chemical smell would be pretty bad. Also, we wouldn’t be getting our power turned on until this was cleaned up, because they had to do both apartments at once for some reason, and there was feces shoved in the electrical outlets. Luckily, summer exams had just ended and my parents lived just across town. The roommate and I both packed our bags and bunked out in my old bedroom at my parents’ house.

In the end, they had to replace a few walls, rip out all the carpeting, and use industrial strength cleaners to get that apartment clean again. One of the other tenants who was helping cut his hand while cleaning up the cat litter, and his hand got so infected he wound up in the hospital for almost a week, getting his hand drained and his body pumped full of antibiotics. The doctors had never seen an infection that bad from touching cat poop, and said that the cat that came from as too sick to exist.

That was quite the experience, having to deal with all that. And that is why you check out the neighbours before you move into a new place, sunshine!